By Ameya Karve

In his two-decade career as an asset manager, Pankaj Murarka hasn’t shied from calling time on Indian stocks.

At the first signs of the financial crisis, he took cover when many others thought the country’s shares would be immune to any global turmoil. So when the benchmark stock gauge shed more than half its value in 2008, Murarka, by his own account, was one of the few investors who preserved his clients’ capital.

“The theory prevalent then was India was decoupled” from the global economy, Murarka, the founder and chief investment officer of Renaissance Investment Managers Pvt., said in an interview in Mumbai. “But we could understand that the coming tsunami was so big that it was all hogwash.”

While Murarka’s current fund is small, he has a long history in money management, beginning his career in 1998, a few years after the Indian asset management industry took shape. During his stint at Axis A ..